11.09.2012

Custom groups
Custom groups feature allows you group selected lpars or pools from different servers into one aggregated graph.
Functionality is similar to historical reports, however here you can preconfigure it so you will get required daily-yearly graphs in 2 or 3 clicks
This might be found useful especially for grouping nodes of a active/active cluster to see on one page total CPU utilization per all its nodes
Also for active/passive cluster it might be useful, as you get total CPU utilization all nodes of the cluster (active and passives) no matter which one is actually active.
There can be found many other examples where possibility to group CPU pools or lpars from different servers can be useful.
Note that free LPAR2RRD version (3.20) has actually limitation of maximum 4 lpars or pools in one custom group.

Favourites
Favourites feature allows you choice typically most important or most often viewed CPU pools or lpars and place them into separated menu for quick access.
You can assign them aliases which then appear under "favourites" menu.

Alerting
LPAR2RRD has now build-in alerting feature. You can define alarms for any CPU pool or lpar in your environment.
This feature does not intend to replace your standard alerting you have already in place. It is rather enhanced functionality especially for critical CPU pools and lpars.
There are 3 main reasons why use it:

Possibility to monitor whole physical servers.
This is something what usual monitoring tools are not able to provide for IBM Power™ platform

Possibility to monitor CPU pools.
Same as for above, you can hardly find it in usual monitoring/alerting tools for IBM Power™ platform

Alarming here is based on "real physical consumption".
There is still a lot of monitoring tools which are not aware of virtualization and provide not accurate data for CPU alerting/monitoring.

The main targets of storage monitoring is graphing of key performance parameters of the storages like throughput, IO, cache utilization ... per the storage/rank ... in similar and simple way how lpar2rrd does it for CPU.
It should act as a tool for quick performance check of the storage and for getting trends with intention of capacity planning.